With the proliferation and development of various telecommunication technologies, getting a busy signal or no answer is becoming almost extinct. Many technologies allow calls to be forwarded to voicemail systems, other human parties, and so on, allowing callers to reach the called party eventually in one form or another.
A typical use of such systems is in service industry, where callers are first greeted by an automated system presenting questions and determining a proper destination for the call based on voice-recognized responses or Dual Tone Multi-Frequency (DTMF) entries by the calling party.
Many such systems are, however, static—i.e. based on a set of predetermined rules that are not modified frequently or based on calling party. Thus, for the calling party the system offers a one-size-fits-all kind of blunt approach, which is not the most efficient method for addressing the calling party's needs. For the called party, conventional systems lack the flexibility to enable the called party to make himself/herself available to particular callers in an efficient and dynamic manner. Furthermore, such systems are typically geared toward voice-based communication methods and cannot take advantage of currently evolving multi-modal unified communications, which enable users to communicate via various modes with the help of comprehensive user interfaces.